‘Beta’ - the new ‘under construction’?
– posted July 11th, 2008 by Shane Diffily Comments (3)
I note the new Irish Times website has gone live. Looks like a good, professional job by Web Factory. Well done.
The previous address of the Irish Times - Ireland.com - has now changed to a lifestyle/tourism website.
Not sure that the execution here is as good.
For instance, the new website carries the label ‘Beta‘ in its logo. Can a website really be ‘Beta’?
Application beta
An application certainly can - if some functionality still needs to be ironed out. That is where this label is seen most frequently.
The classic example is Gmail. After 4 years or more it is STILL in beta. (Nearly finished there lads?)
On a website, ‘Beta’ smacks of the old days of ‘under construction‘, i.e. we are not quite ready to golive, but have to.
Indeed, the ireland.com website has 2 navigation icons labelled “coming soon”. Neither is clickable and so we can’t even learn what they have in store.
Why not just leave them out?
Just go live
Perhaps it would be better to just say the website is live as-is, hide anything that is not ready and build it up over time.
Otherwise, won’t it always be ‘Beta’?
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3 comments so far
1. Michele on Jul 13th, 2008 - 12:12
They probably read somewhere that “beta” was a cool and hip term to use, so they’ve plastered it all over the place. They’re also running really odd banner ads on other sites to drive more traffic to them, which is decidedly odd.
Michele
2. Michele on Jul 13th, 2008 - 12:13
And thanks for getting rid of the captcha
3. Muzu.tv, Irish version of Youtube+MySpace | Estelle et Rémy | On Eire on Jul 18th, 2008 - 11:05
[...] lisais un article très intéressant il y a quelques jours : la version Beta est elle le nouveau “Under Construction“ ? Parce que oui, il faut le dire, Muzu n’est pas encore parfait, de nombreuses [...]